I was recently asked to implement pages for customer feedback. This is aimed at customers who just bought one of our products. It is a major purchase of medical equipment.

I initially put the link to the pages in the "Contact" tab. An executive had then asked me to add it to the main tabs along the header. I responded that it might clutter the navigation, but they asked that I do it anyways because they wanted to allow for what they thought was a better user experience.

After reconsideration I can see their point. As this is a new product, the executives want to make sure that they make it very easy to be in touch with the customers to gather feedback and make improvements as necessary. This contact would not normally exist since the company does not sell direct to consumers, but has exclusive dealers.

Hypothesis

My concern however is that a new potential customer who sees this header will think that "Installation Feedback" could mean testimonials about how the installation went. And that "training feedback" could mean testimonials about and a listing of training sessions.

Questions

Is the existing solution offering a good user experience for existing
customers?

Could my concern be justified about the wording? Perhaps we could say "survey" instead of "feedback"?

3 Answers
3

When you put something in the top nav, your users know it's important. It's fine to have it in the header: It tells your users that you are actively soliciting their opinions.

(1) Verbs are good — typically better than nouns, unless the noun is very common / familiar. "Feeback" might work, but "send feedback" might be even better.

(2) Agree that combining these into one menu item is a reasonable idea. It saves space. Then, in the dropdown, you can use clear sentence-type verbiage: "Send feedback about training / Send feedback about installation". (Bolding keywords helps users scan microcontent for the relevant term that differentiates menu options — for example, Google does this in its search results to help you identify the search term in the context of each result.)

Do you run usability tests? I wouldn't use 5secondtest because it's usually designers who provide feedback and they're VERY biased — they're far, far more attuned to subtle visual nuances than non-designers. However, you could pretty cheaply run a usertesting.com usability study — although unless they're your users it may be hard to simulate the context that your own users would have with the software. :-/

Kudos to your company for asking for user feedback, by the way. It's far too common for enterprise / business software developers to put end-user needs at the bottom of the stack since they don't sell to the end-user but to the business.

How are current customers getting to this site? Are they prompted for feedback somewhere in the product packaging? Or is the idea that a current customer would stumble onto this site, at which point you would want to prompt them to leave feedback? As a current customer, I don't know if I would view either of those links and see it as an invitation to leave feedback.

What about a prompt on the site, similar to HelloBar (http://www.hellobar.com/) that says something to the effect of: "Currently using IOS? We've love to hear your feedback."

I would definitely find some way to visually differentiate this feature from the standard nav, and have it appear as an obvious invitation to existing customers. Just putting those nav items in there will likely drive little to no feedback, and will just confuse existing and potential customers alike.

+1 because this isn't really navigation, it's a secondary action that doesn't really belong in the main menu.
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Jeremy TDec 3 '13 at 21:07

From what I know, they customers will receive a followup email and/or call asking for feedback. I think the original idea was to provide them the links. But I can see how that would create less conversion when you give them two separate links. So now I think they salesman just send them an email and redirect them back to the main website. I say, "i think" because the sales teams are external and I know that they are experimenting with various approaches. I just wanted to be able to provide quality feedback to help rather than just agree to code.
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JGallardoDec 3 '13 at 21:45

1

We have a feedback button prominently displayed in our main webapp header and we get tons of feedback from it. I don't know what your basis is for saying that having those links will likely drive little to no feedback.
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ElBelDec 3 '13 at 22:33

The first thing that came to mind was to use a sub-menu called "Feedback" and place those two under there. If there's one thing users tend to do; it's that they look for what they need if it's clearly labelled. The easiest way to be sure about this is to A/B test this manually or with a tool like http://fivesecondtest.com/ but I personally feel sub-navigation allows for a cleaner UI and more space.

I agree about the subnavigation. I had suggested it as an option but I think my annotated wireframe was too rough and they expected something less aesthetic. Thanks for the link for A/B testing.
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JGallardoDec 3 '13 at 19:49

1

I generally agree with the approach. Though It's probably overkill to A/B test something this small. This is a pretty straightforward thing to do.
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ElBelDec 3 '13 at 22:30